Ahmed Manalaba, a professor of geology at Jordan’s Hashemite University, said the dams built by Turkey at the expense of Syria and Iraq played a geological role in the strong earthquake that struck at dawn last Monday.
He explained that the dams were not the direct cause, but they helped in causing the earthquake from a geological point of view, noting that “Turkish dams have reached their peak and become one of the largest dams in the world in terms of geology.” storage facilities and that these dams have a strategic reserve of more than 651 billion cubic meters.”
And he stated that “this amount of water affects the earth’s crust and even the entire Earth, and is equivalent to ten times the Renaissance Dam,” adding: “These amounts of water mean a lot in the first place for the entire Earth, since it can delay, even for seconds , the movement of the Earth’s rotation due to this weight, even if the water was distributed elsewhere on land, so things might be simpler than they are now.”
He pointed out that “water seeps through cracks, breaks and breaks in the earth, so this water sinks into underground pools, and these pools are naturally saturated with water”, indicating that if “water increases, then this leads to its expansion and increase in the amount the water stored in it, and also leads to the expansion or process of expansion of cracks in underground basins, and this leads to the disruption or cracking of these faults, which actually happened.
Regarding whether this was the cause of the earthquake, the Jordanian expert and academic explained that “it causes an earthquake, but in the current situation in Anatolia, it may have helped, because the main thing is the tectonic point and the movement of plates, especially the Arabian plate, towards the Eurasian plate or lesser Anatolian plate.
And about whether the big dams in Turkey increased the strength of the earthquake, and whether they were the main cause, because this is a seismic zone, Malaba said: “Yes … if there is movement of these underground faults and faults, then this is due to the presence of water that leaches or descends into these basins, which increases the area of the fault surfaces and thus leads to the movement of the same tectonic movement that occurs due to the plates, but at the level of the faults can extend up to 100 kilometers.
Source: “Ammon”
